Maps
by W.Blackbird
Summary: Prompt 25: I have a song prompt based on Maroon 5's Maps. It fits Everlark so much. Peeta was there for Katniss in her dark times while she almost gave up on him when he was at his worst down on his knees. But eventually he followed the map that led to her and they got back together. [Written for Spring 2019 Everlark Fic Exchange]


**A/N:** This one shot references the lyrics to Down in the Valley which is an Appalachian folk song I headcanon as being "The Valley Song." It's a pretty good song for Everlark too which works quite nicely. There are several variations to it, as is typical of folk songs, I chose the version I felt suited the best.

**Maps**

I was there for you

In your darkest times

I was there for you

In your darkest nights

But I wonder, where were you?

When I was at my worst

Down on my knees

And you said you had my back

So I wonder, where were you?

When all the roads you took came back to me

It seemed like he was getting better. Somedays felt good, others bad; sometimes he wasn't sure. Holistically, they said he was getting better, yet something niggled away at his subconscious. Something he couldn't reach. In his dreams, he is in the dark reaching for something. He wakes up before he can find it.

Therapy is complex, difficult. There seem to be so many issues, so many fractures. Healing his mind feels like he has two hundred improperly healed bones they need to re-break and reset. The nature of the healing tends to fall in two camps though. First is dealing with the present. Bringing yourself into the present. It took him awhile to do that. It's easier to live in the could-have-beens. Or just not anywhere children are bombed. But he stamps his feet, touches his face. _This is where I am. This is where I live._ It's a harsh cruel world, but it's still that way even if he lives in his time-loopy brain. Better in the present where he can do something, grasp something, learn to avoid triggers, to handle flashbacks. He's had enough fake. He's not _there_ anymore. That's no longer his reality. Mind over matter. He laughs at the notion when both have been desecrated. So much has been stripped away. He knows he will never get it back. He just needs to know how to move forward. He needs to know what makes him, him. Second camp is dealing with just that. Tracker Jacker venom, even without the torture and hijacking, is designed to target your brain to show your very worst fears. They say it's driven men mad. Is he mad? Peeta needs to know what his worst fears are–better yet, face them–if he really wants to distinguish reality from shiny. He screams in his sleep and destroys rooms in his rages. He thinks it's not an inaccurate thing to call him mad. He is in every sense.

It all comes back to Katniss. Everything has to come back to Katniss. Dr. Aurelius stresses that his life cannot revolve around one person, and he knows that's true. It's not healthy to exist for a person. You are a person independently, but the hijacking was about Katniss, breaking Katniss, ruining Katniss. He needs to know how the venom would affect that. What would he most fear about Katniss? What did they target?

It's sadly obvious, especially when they talk about his childhood. The bitter mother who had deigned to have another child in the hopes it might be a girl. It wasn't. The father who turned a blind eye to the beatings. His brothers who paired up against him, but weren't particularly close to each other either. The tense politics. Did his mother love him? Did his brothers? His father? He was closest to his father, he recalls.

"Do you think he loved you?"

"I don't know. I mean, I guess he did, but I often thought it might just be guilt. Like when Mom would take a wooden spoon to me, even a rolling pin, I would get bruised, and Dad would do nothing, but afterwards he would slip me cookies. I wasn't above taking advantage of it. I knew if Dad saw me bruised up, I'd be more likely to get away with things. If he really loved me though, he ought to have stood up, stopped it. He said he was 'keeping the peace,' but there's no peace in a household like that. He was a coward. Giving me cookies doesn't make up for it. It was just his way of trying to make himself feel better."

"People aren't one-dimensional. It's quite possible your father felt guilty, especially if it is he who pushed for another child. Likewise, there is no denying he should have stepped in where he saw abuse, but would he have felt guilty if he didn't care? You said you were closest to him. Did you feel he loved you in spite of the hurt? Can you separate your worth from other people's actions?"

Ha! They talk it over again and again. He's only ever partially sold on it. It makes Peeta feel pathetic. That after all he's been through, all he's seen and done, all he wants to know is if his Mommy loved him, but it's important, so important, because it feels like Katniss abandoned him, and used him, and he's so pathetic he took her scraps while she gave it all to Gale. Used him, abandoned him, tossed him aside like trash, and he the fool who allowed it. _Stupid boy. Useless child. _They could convince him she wasn't a mutt, and he could convince himself he didn't want to be a violent killer, but the hardest thing to shake is feeling worthless. That's the real fear, and ten times harder to shake when the last thing he remembers after allowing her to bite down on his flesh, saving her life, is her screaming and screaming Gale's name. And that this happened when he'd deluded himself, again, that maybe she cared, because she didn't kill him, because she kissed him, because of what Gale said, because she gave him a nightlock pill that was meant for Gale. She'd insisted he take it, closed his hands over it. That feels important, like something just outside his reach. Reaching. Reaching. Reaching. He cannot touch it. Why is it important? It only made sense what she did. It was only fair. She and Gale were together. He was alone. No one to shoot him if need be. But it still feels important. He fixates on it, but nothing. There's nothing, but the nagging ache. He was a fool. Fooled again by Katniss Everdeen.

He doesn't hate her anymore. He knows that. He doesn't believe she was trying to kill him, even in their games. Definitely not in the Quell. He's seen the footage again and again and again. There was no faking that force field. Gale said that kiss was real. He's inclined to believe it. There's no reason Gale would lie about that. Peeta is concerned. Worried. Scared. He knows Katniss is in Twelve, but otherwise nothing. She does not answer calls. There is no response to his letters. He is abandoned. Unloved. Unwanted. Unwanted. Unwanted.

_You're still trying to protect me. Real or not real?_

_Real. That's what you and I do. Keep each other alive._

_After that I always thought of you as an ally._

Was that all it was? An alliance to keep each other alive? But then why the self-sacrifice? And if she cared enough to die, why wasn't she here? Why, with the exception of that one time she visited him, has she never come to see him? Why? He protected her; he held her on the train. Those memories the Capitol couldn't quite touch, just alter his impressions of. He tries to remove the taint of fear, of abandonment, look at it objectively. If she wasn't just a user, if she cared and trusted him in her bed, and he loved her enough to hold her in the night, why wasn't she here in his darkest night? Why? Why? Why?

Peeta fills papers with etchings of the word why. Why? Why? In various angry angles. Why? It's like the last piece of the puzzle. He cannot go home until he knows this, because he does not know to handle the enigma that is Katniss. He will have no peace until he knows, has an answer he can live with. He needs to process it, put it in its place. Was he played for a fool? Or was he–is he still–just a fool in love?

Why?

He watches the footage again about how he told her he heard her sing when they were five years old. His memory of it is… faint. He looks up the lyrics to the Valley Song hoping to jog the memory. Some lines stick out like a sore thumb.

_If you don't love me, love who you please._

_Wrap your arms around me, give my heart ease._

Was that it? She loved someone else, and he knew it, but didn't care? He was content just to be able to hold her? There seems to be a hint of truth in that. There's no denying Katniss has suffered greatly, and he'd like to think he's not so heartless as to not try and be there for her. (But shouldn't she do the same? Couldn't she just write back? Call? Check up on him? If they were at least friends?) (But she protected him. Didn't want to be separated from him. Gave him the pill). Distantly he thinks he remembers crying when he listened to the song as a boy, but was that just baseless infatuation with a pretty voice? With the idea of even "Angels in Heaven know I love you"? Or was it merely the words about not being loved back, and being happy with scraps or cookies which resonated with a young, neglected boy? Something else entirely?

Peeta pulls up the footage of Katniss singing about the hanging tree, because if he fell in love with her because she sang, maybe he can find his way back to understanding if he hears her again.

_Are you, are you_

_Coming to the tree_

_Wear a necklace of rope_

_Side by side with me._

Peeta listens. It's undeniable her voice is beautiful, that the birds stop to listen. It sends chills down his spine, but Peeta is an artist and more interested in what lies in her voice, why she chose this song. There's a desperation in her tone, a resignation, an entreaty, a strange kind of hope, almost a yearning. He cannot say he isn't affected by it. Was she suicidal even then?

_Wear a necklace of rope_

_Side by side with me_

How many people had answered the call and died side by side? He'd heard they'd sung it as they attacked the hydroelectric dam. Was this a call to die together for a cause? To be free? He shakes his head. He's still missing something. He knows he is. He shuts the recording off, and goes to sleep.

As he dreams he's haunted by lines of The Valley Song that echo through his head in Katniss's voice, but sweeter, younger, more innocent…loving.

_Down in the valley,_

_Walking between,_

_Telling our story,_

_Here's what it sings._

A two-braided Katniss Everdeen is holding out her hands to him. Her hands are stained red with berry juice that oozes out of a Nightlock capsule.

"Are you coming to the tree?" She asks and raises her hand to bite down on the pill. He sees his hands rush forward to stop her, but all he sees is older, eighteen year old Katniss Everdeen swinging from a tree. He wakes with a gasp. What the Hell was that?

As is his wont, Peeta sketches his nightmares out. Are you coming to the tree? But Katniss was carrying a pill that oozed juice like berries. He guessed it made sense. The nightlock pills were so named after the stunt he and Katniss had pulled in their first arena. Death and suicide is death and suicide. It all gets muddled in his subconscious. Honestly, as nightmares go, he's had significantly worse. There is an emotion he felt at the end, when he was reaching for her, he doesn't recognise. He has to remind himself not to fixate and let it go. It'll come when it comes. Instead he watches the double suicide scene again.

He's struck with a new thought as the berries cross her lips. One he's not sure he's ever considered before. What if it wasn't a bluff? Would she really have eaten those berries? He's not sure, and at this point he's not expecting any kind of answer from Katniss. He's alone in this. Maybe this needs to be about how he understands it anyway.

_Are you coming to the tree?_

Had he? Did he?

He's not sure. He never is anymore.

She hadn't been dead in the first arena though, nor condemned to it. Why would she bite? What motive could she have? What gain would there be? He was the one bleeding out, and there'd been nothing for him to lose in biting down on them, especially if he wanted to get her home. The same didn't hold true for her. She was probably just bluffing. He decides he can't fault her for that though, at least she tried to get him home too. He knew she had family that depended on her. He can't fault her for her actions. Not really. At least she'd tried the bluff. Or was she truly suicidal then too? Did it go back that far? Doubtful. She'd fought too hard for that. Maybe she wasn't even suicidal when she sung Hanging Tree. Maybe it was just a creepy song.

She haunts him every night. After his day is done, his sessions over with, he lies and mulls over the mystery of her. He sees a broken girl. He sees a scared girl. A selfless girl maybe, although with the hijacking that's hard to accept, but he sees what she did for her sister, for Rue, even for him. He'd think she was just a kind, but human girl who's been through too much were it not for how she approaches him: There for him, but not really. He cannot help but feel slighted by her. Where was she? The girl who would defend him, and guard him against death, but claims she could shoot him as easily as any other Capitol mutt. There's some piece to the puzzle missing here, and if he could find it, he's sure he'd understand this riddle.

Invariably he just plays The Hanging Tree on repeat like a sick lullaby to bring him to sleep. It's the only footage he has of Katniss he knows for certain wasn't meant for a propo. It's his only slice of real. She chose the song of her own accord, for her own reasons. Peeta watches the footage of him warning her not to trust everyone just prior to her going to Twelve, hoping to find a link to the song. He doesn't see it, and neither does it seem an entirely appropriate response to the destruction of Twelve, unless it's resignation at the deaths that will come from the rebellion. It's the song of someone condemned to death claiming freedom, calling another to die for it too. It's not a concept he's entirely unfamiliar with. When he'd coded on the table, and they'd brought him back, it had felt like being trapped all over again. He'd have rather been dead. He'd been grateful when Lavinia and Darius had been put out of their misery.

Thoughts of death over capture, death over torture, and listening to the Hanging Tree no less, it's no wonder his dreams are grim and confusing.

_Are you, are you_

_Coming to the tree?_

The two lines repeat poignantly through a dark night. Peeta can't see anything. He's running through the forest trying to find…something, someone, reaching… Lightning flashes, and in the illumination he sees the silhouette of a massive tree.

He wakes up.

Peeta devotes most of the rest of the day to painting the lightning tree with strokes of white, yellow, brown, black, and blue. Perhaps it's fanciful, but he wonders if Katniss was thinking about how they'd been supposed to meet up at midnight when she sang that song. That maybe she'd seen his tortured state in his interview with Caesar and had lamented that he'd been left behind.

…Just not enough to be here after he was brought back. Or even here now. In any capacity. Letters. Phone calls. Nothing. Even when he saved her damn life, proved he wasn't trying to wrap his hands around her throat, not to kill her anyway, but to save her. That's the heart of what is bothering Peeta, and the height of his hope. He'd thought he was slowly understanding Katniss Everdeen. He traces the scars where she bit him over and over and over again, because it is proof: Proof he is not only a Capitol mutt, a liability. He was remade to kill her, but when it counted, he'd saved her, stopped her taking that pill. Maybe he is not a monster. Then she screamed and screeched for Gale…

He doesn't understand. What was Gale supposed to do?

He looks back at his drawings of the first strange dream. The little girl with the berry-pill. She asked him if he was coming to the tree. This girl had wanted to take that pill. She wanted him to take it with her. Katniss had tried to bite down on that pill. She'd also closed his hands over the pill Gale had given him, telling him it was for last resorts, like she'd placed the berries in his hands. Victory or death. Then she'd hugged him, and he'd felt scared, trapped, vulnerable, she was too close to vital organs. She could kill him. But it also felt safe and familiar. Muscle memory had him wrapping his arms around her, fighting through the hijacking. It had felt wisest to separate, but he could feel Katniss's anxiety. Had they felt that way in the Quell? It's like something slides into place in his mind, and he remembers her kissing him, saying she'll see him at midnight. Remembers the anxiety. These aren't just images on a screen to him anymore. He wonders if this is progress.

There are many avenues to memory. Muscle memory like what happened with the hug had happened only once before with Katniss. When she had kissed him when they'd been running from the mutts. It had felt so familiar, but of course it had, they'd done it often enough. Had she meant it though? Or was it just her using a kiss to get what she wanted? Him in his right mind. He can't hold mere survival instinct against her, heck it might have even saved his own life if they'd had to shoot him instead, but it doesn't mean that she meant it. That's always the problem. Real. Not real. Real. Not real. It had made him feel good in the moment. She'd kissed him even when he was just the Capitol Mutt: The liability. For awhile, he'd thought she'd cared personally.

_A lot of things should count for something that don't seem to._

He really is mad.

After three days of sulking Peeta pulls up the footage of his first interview with Caesar after he was captured trying to find if there was anything more about the Lightning tree moment he'd forgotten, but nothing new comes. "Neither of us knew anything except that we were trying to keep each other alive!" He's all but shouting in Caesar's face. That at least confirms what Katniss was saying about the two of them protecting each other. So he watches the next interview. Again, nothing. Finally, he watches the footage of him warning Thirteen of the attack. He watches it again, and again, and again. It's futile though. They'd jacked him up so high on venom, his memory of it all is nothing but loopy, if it exists at all. He clearly hadn't felt abandoned by Katniss in that cell though, not like he does here. (Even though he lost his goddamn leg getting her out of the their first arena, she still doesn't even have the consideration to answer the questions he sends her.) Is it because he's ignorant, a fool, or is it something else? Is it because the kiss on the beach was real? Like Gale had implied? Whatever it was, it was strong enough to fight the fear-conditioning enough to talk. He shuts off the projector with a huff. There are no answers here.

_Are you, are you coming to the tree,_

_Where the dead man called out for his love to flee?_

Well, she might have been his love once, but that had meant for nothing in the end. She'd visited him once, reluctantly, and hadn't been very nice. Had had the audacity to snark about kissing Gale too. He'd been asking perfectly reasonable questions too. All things considered he'd been decent, and decidedly not a "dead man" at that, but a living one who needed answers.

Bitch.

He tries to examine every bitter, angry thought like that against the knowledge of his hijacking, but honestly she _is_ a bitch. He gets she's grieving, but so is he. He lost his whole damn family, and his leg, and his sanity, but if she asked him questions he'd still have the decency to answer. She responds to none of his letters. It's like she does the bear minimum of human decency, _keep each other alive,_ no kidding, and that's it. Allies. Allies are together out of need, nothing else. _I need you._ Yeah, to keep her alive. When the game's over, the alliance ends. Goodbye. He doesn't hate her for it. He's mad, but he doesn't hate her. She's a piece of work is all. He was just a fool, and when he gets out of here maybe he'll go to Four or Seven or Eleven, but he is not going back to Twelve. When he feels guilty about it, remembering she risked her life for him in the Capitol, he reminds himself it's not more than they all did for each other. Nothing special. He doesn't owe her a damn thing. Why should he go see her? When she won't contact him after all he's done? Hell, she'd have shot him herself if she'd absolutely had too. That kiss being nothing more than a manipulation. _It'd be just like shooting another one of the Capitol's mutts._ He tries to forget about her, but truth is all he does is stew in outrage.

He dreams about that kiss-on-the-run again and again and again, and hates himself for it. Not just because he dreams of her, but because sometimes he is unbearably rough with her when he responds which he can only attribute to the hijacking. Well, that or he is extremely angry with her in his subconscious too. It's only when he has the nightmare he wraps his hands around her neck like he'd done right after his rescue, he reminds himself what a risk she really had taken in kissing him. He is breathing and gasping when he wakes up from it, cold with sweat, and he goes to change his shirt, splash water on his face. When he looks in the mirror with dead eyes staring back he wonders how she knew he wouldn't have done it. He was close then, even now he feels it within him: The rage that lies sleeping, has always lain there even in childhood. He still fights to reign it in, and used to use wrestling to release the excess pressure of. How had she known he wouldn't give in to it? How? He falls back into bed a lethargic lump. As he drifts in and out of the realms of consciousness and sleep, he remembers the desperation in her eyes.

"How did you know I wouldn't kill you?" He asks in the dream.

"I didn't." She replies.

Suicidal even then, or just plain insane. Maybe she is as crazy as they whisper about when they decided to send her back to Twelve in exile. Maybe that's why she doesn't answer his letters. Maybe she's a loon. When he falls back to sleep he thinks he hears singing.

_Write me a letter,_

_Send it by mail._

_Send it in care of,_

_The Birmingham Jail._

Maybe he will go back, just once, to check up on her.

He spends the next few days of his free time trying to sketch her lying in bed with him. He remembers that, and there must have been trust on both sides for it to have happened, but he only remembers flashes. Isn't sure of a lot of it. Was this when he'd told her "Always?" He's not sure. He's been given to understand they helped keep each other's nightmares at bay. She'd asked him to stay. Was this when he'd said it? He must have said it before, because after she'd kissed him that time, she'd begged him, "Stay with me." The reply had come without forethought. Only afterward did he taste the familiarity on his tongue. He'd said it often. Always. Always. Always. Always. Stay with me. Stay with me. Not us. Me. Her. Maybe he's reading too much into it. If she'd wanted him, she could have talked to him properly when he'd asked for her in Thirteen. She was trying to get him back to reality, out of his flashbacks, when she kissed him. That's all. It was about survival.

And he could've believed that if he hadn't just come to the conclusion that maybe she was as much a headcase as he was now, because survival doesn't bite through people's hands trying to get to suicide pills. Nightlock. She hadn't cared to live. So…

He has a headache.

He wants to ask Dr. Aurelius if it's true Katniss is that mentally unstable, but is scared to reveal so much of himself, and he cannot help but feel that if he is truly getting better, he ought to be able to work this much out for himself. Because if the hijacking destroyed his understanding of Katniss, surely the treatment would mean it would come back? So he runs his conclusions through his head.

Katniss is not perfect, but is not evil, has even been known to be quite selfless

Refused to shoot him, but risked her own life for him in the Capitol

Has been suicidal for awhile

She seems to care about him on some kind of level, because she told him to take the pill

And she hugged him when she didn't have to.

He's not sure how far the caring lies, mainly because she has never been there for him, certainly not like he had been for her in the past.

He's not sure why she's not answering his letters now, but thinks maybe she's trapped in her own head too.

It's all random bits of information. He is missing the critical piece that ties it all together, painting a cohesive picture that makes sense. So he draws Prim's death. Katniss going down in flames. Was this what broke her so badly she'd been exiled? Was this why there are no phone calls and no letters? He misses Prim too, a lot. He can only imagine how Katniss must feel after everything that has happened, and all she did to keep her sister safe. He chokes on sobs, and tears pierce his eyes as he considers how deeply she must be grieved. In this moment, he can forgive her her absence. He'll never claw the dead children out from behind his eyes. He feels a strange, familiar urge to wrap his arms around her.

_Stay with me._

_Always._

Prim told him once Katniss struggles to see people in pain, especially people she cares about, and she isn't good with blood. She always runs away when her sister and her mother were taking care of patients. She'd told him as a comfort when he questioned, if the girl cared so fucking much, why she wasn't there in Thirteen coming to see him. He wonders if it's true that it was because she cared and it hurt. He has seen how much Rue's death devastated her. She hadn't known Rue nearly as long as her own sister, or as long as she'd known Peeta. It makes her a bit self-centered, maybe, because he'd really needed to talk to her, but maybe it's also not horrifically bitchy.

He tries to recall her body language. The way she'd held herself when she'd come to see him, like she was trying to hold in all her internal organs, like she was wounded. She'd looked unhealthy, unkempt. _Everyone says that's why Snow had you tortured. To break me. _He'd never considered until just now that maybe it had worked, because she'd been suicidal, if her song choice was any indication, if her kissing him was any indication, long before Prim's death. She'd also pointed out people were watching, he notices as he pulls up and re-watches the footage. Maybe it made her feel uncomfortable? He hadn't thought of that before. People were always watching; he'd been past caring; he'd been skeptical and hateful and angry. It was all he could do to stay in control. He listened for explicit answers. Nothing else. He didn't have the energy to spare for it. Now he's curious. She had started talking to him more when the cameras were put away. In the Capitol, she'd played Real or Not Real with him. Maybe she'd felt guilty. Maybe she'd felt less hunted.

He is standing on a thick bough, high in a tree. Jabberjays sing all around him.

_Are you, are you_

_Coming to the tree_

_Where they strung up a man_

_They say who murdered three_

There is a noose wrapped around his throat. He smells blood and roses. He is shoved forward, and wakes before the quick stop.

_That's why Snow tortured you. To break me._

Shit. It's his first thought on waking, because he realizes something. Katniss didn't sing that song as her own call to arms. It's his. She was answering his call. She'd wanted him to be dead, and she with him, to go to a place where it didn't hurt. Or at least, that's how he thinks she must have seen it… Like those nightlock berries! He'd been strung up. He'd been dying, and she held out the berries. Together or not at all, she'd told the Capitol. She'd told him. He pulls up the sketch again of the little girl holding a nightlock pill that oozes juice. _Are you coming to the tree? _She'd been echoing his words, his story. She really did care. He believes it now, because that's why she kissed him. Together or not at all. I_ should never have let them separate us!_ Peeta had said. He'd understood. Maybe he still did. Loving someone enough to lay your life on the line.

_Where a dead man called out,_

_For his love to flee._

And hadn't he been dead? When he called for her to flee the coming bombs, isn't that when they'd killed him? Hijacked him beyond recognition? _I wouldn't be shooting Peeta. He's gone._That's what she must have believed. She'd tried afterwards, played the game with him, but then her sister died. Her desperate, "Stay with me," seems ten times more so now, because if Peeta's worst fear is being used and unwanted, then Katniss's must be losing people. Her father. Her mother. Her sister. Him? How can he expect her to handle her worst fears any better than he has?

So when she'd made to bite that capsule, she'd be dying to be free, because it's not about what you can die for, but what you refuse to live with. He'd known going into the Games, that the price of his soul, his identity, his integrity, wasn't worth his life. Better to live a short life you can look yourself in the mirror with, than a long, shameful one, where you turn a blind eye to the evils of this world. Better die together, live free, then live alongside cruelty. Alone. Fight the pain and win on your terms, or die and escape it. And he sees this might have always been the plan. She told him to take the capsule, but hadn't killed Gale when he'd been captured. She hadn't expected to survive, hadn't expected Peeta to survive, didn't really think he was even alive, but she hadn't killed Gale when he got captured, so when Peeta stopped her from hanging, she hadn't been calling for Gale to flee… but to help her do so.

Peeta looks at the painting of the tree with the illumination of the powerful lightening; he adds two nooses hanging from its boughs; he adds two severed limbs, arms, holding pills that bleed juice. He paints the truth of two people who brave death together to find freedom. This is their gamble, but not their bluff. He finds resolve, peace.

He's going home when released. He's going straight back to Twelve, because the war is over. And they weren't the ones who had to hang.

_Bird in a cage, love_

_Bird in a cage,_

_Dying for freedom_

_Ever a slave._

Not anymore, because he's going home.

It's time to live again.


End file.
